Final Fantasy IV: The After might just be making it’s way out of Japan and over to western shores, according to some reliable sources close to Square-Enix.

Final Fantasy IV: The After is a Japanese mobile phone game released in episodic pieces, following the adventures of Cecil and Rosa’s son Ceodore, 17 years after the events of the previous game, and featuring most (possibly all) of the original cast. The title uses an altered version of the game’s original 2D engine.

The game unique ability is the ‘band’ ability (similar to the Palom and Porom’s TwinCast ability in the original game, but vastly expanded upon), which lets characters in your party join together to create new, more powerful attacks.

Recent comments by Producer Takashi Tokita, who has a long history with this particular Final Fantasy, substantiate the possibility of this story reaching foreign shores…

“We just remade it, so it’s a bit of a stretch… [Laughs] Currently the sequel, FINAL FANTASY IV the After: Tsuki no Kikan is available for mobile phones in Japan. We’ll do our best to make this game available for our overseas audiences as well!”

What form this game will take is unknown, but it certainly won’t be on mobile due the disparaging technological advancements between Japanese and western cellphones. The Wii’s Virtual Content download service seems like the most likely bet, or possibly as a GameBoy Advance game, but that would be far less likely

This is a shoe in for the Wii Shop channel and Virtual Console. Just look at similar episode based games like Strong Bad, Sam & Max and Wallace and Gromit, they’re all coming out, or already on the Wii.

Anyone that enjoys that stupid Strong Bad game/webpage isnt smart enough to enjoy a quality Final Fantasy game. Go back to playing Strong Bad and other baby games like Cooking Mamma and leave the big boy games to the adults.

Square makes a lot more money by charging you per chapter (which is what they did for this game plus Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy: Unlimited with U.) You pay a monthly fee for the game and you pay a fee for each chapter. They don’t want to release this game for the DS or Wii or any other format because they won’t be able to make as much money as they would with the game being a cellphone release only.

Seriously, am I the only one outside of Japan that grasps this concept? I’ve been reading about potential releases of this game and Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII for a long time and no one seems to understand this, which says a lot about the people writing the articles…gba? the resolution is too low for the 240×240 resolution that the game is in…come on now, do some research…

Plus if they do release it outside of cellphones, then the Japanese gamers feel screwed and Square is a “Japan First” type of company, so they care mostly about Japan, everyone else is an afterthought. Need proof of this? Then explain why Japan (and some other Asian countries) are the only ones that have the full version of Final Fantasy X, X-2 and XII?

We only received the basic first release, and yes I know that Europe had a release of Final Fantasy X that was almost as complete as the Japanese one, but that barely counts as anything more than a rare exception to the rule. You’ll see, Japan will release “Final Fantasy XIII: International” about 5 months after the USA release and it will Japan only and PS3 only. Not a guess either, this is almost a fact.

[...] may recall, we reported a few months ago that the Final Fantasy IV episodic sequel, FFIV: The After might be coming west-side. While Square Enix has yet to make any official announcement, recent information has proven that [...]